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Chiaki wakes to lips against his — wet, pressing, insistent — and green, green eyes.
He draws in a juddering inhale, and then the green eyes pulls back, and Chiaki’s eyes screw up in a cough, horrid and wet and coarse, scraping his throat something awful on the way up. More seawater than Chiaki wants to admit escapes him, mixes with the sand he’s laying on until it darkens to a golden-brown.
When he can draw in enough breath to drag his eyes open, those intense green eyes are nowhere to be found. Just soft sand stretching as far as the eye can see, an orange-red sunset, and the soft hush-hush-hush of the waves lapping against the shore.
-
“Huh? You’re really okay with working with pirates?”
Chiaki traces his fingers along the length of a sizable twig. He deems it dry enough, and then picks it up with his free hand and lets it join the quickly growing bundle of similar branches and twigs in his other arm. “Yep!” he says, tone bright. The pirate who (begrudgingly, and under the orders of who Chiaki knows is his commanding officer) came with him on this excursion to find firewood crosses his arms against his chest and leans against a nearby palm tree. He hasn’t picked up a single piece of firewood yet, but Chiaki’s hoping that will change by the end of this trip. “We may be enemies on the sea, but without a way to get home we’re forced to be allies, aren’t we?” He laughs, and it fills the humid tropical air like sunlight. “For survival’s sake, I can put aside any animosity.”
The pirate studies him, amber eyes glinting. “We don’ need your help, though,” he says. It feels like a threat and a test in equal parts.
Chiaki hums, stooping to assess another log. The moss on top is plenty dry, but the wood beneath the crackling green is damp — a shame. Chiaki pries the moss from the bark and adds it to his collection. “But I need yours,” Chiaki says. When he looks over at the pirate, he seems shocked that Chiaki would admit such a thing. “I’m not sure where the other members of my crew have ended up. Until I can find them, it makes the most sense to seek out other allies.”
A heavy, weighted moment passes between the two, deep in the unfamiliar jungle. Then the pirate breaks it with a laugh, loud and wild. “You’re a weird one, aren’t ya?” Chiaki isn’t quite sure how to respond to that. He grins, and that pulls another laugh from the pirate. “Jeez, okay. Maybe those navy fuckers ain’t all bad.”
“I assure you,” Chiaki says, “we are all the furthest thing from bad, and very firm in our stance on upholding the justice of the seas! That is the reason I joined the navy, after all!”
The pirate smiles at Chiaki. It feels like less of a smile and more of a leer, lips pulled back just enough for Chiaki to see unnaturally sharp canines, the almost feral glint in his eyes. “We’ll make a pirate of ya by the end of this. Just you wait.”
Chiaki burns with the familiar fire of a challenge. “You can certainly try!”
The man’s leer spreads into a full smile, much less intimidating than before. He walks forward, then steps around Chiaki and reaches down to the ground. When Chiaki turns around, the pirate is holding a sizable log — and one that seems completely dry, from the looks of it. Perfect for the fire that the other two pirates were hoping to start on the beach. “The name’s Oogami,” the pirate says. “And don’tcha forget it!”
“Nice to meet you, Oogami,” Chiaki says, voice sincere. He takes the piece of wood that Oogami is offering, adding it to his steadily growing collection. “Morisawa Chiaki, Captain of the S.S. Meteor , at your service!”
-
The pirates trust him enough to let him come fishing with them. Or maybe they don’t plan on sharing their food with him; either way, it leaves Chiaki to imitate the actions of the one who introduced himself as Adonis, albeit with a crudely made wooden spear instead of his bare hands. (Chiaki almost gave Adonis tips on how to catch fish, or at least what he could remember from his survival training lessons, but the ease and grace with which Adonis scooped up fish after fish made him hold his tongue. He still has yet to reel in a single catch.)
He’s already knee-deep in water, but Chiaki wades in a bit deeper. Maybe the fish just won’t come that close to shore…?
A splash sounds from his left, and Chiaki whips his head around, hoping to catch sight of some kind of tail slipping back beneath the water, any indication that there’s a school of fish nearby, just waiting for him to come and catch them.
There’s no fin, no tails, no glinting scales, but — Chiaki swears, for a moment, that he sees a glint of green eyes and blue hair. A fragment of a memory — the golden-orange sunset, coughing up half the sea from his lungs, lips pressed against his own, the taste of salt and ocean air on his tongue.
And then the sunlight reflects off of an incoming wave, near-blinding, and Chiaki can only think that he imagined it.
-
“I think,” Adonis says, voice heavy and blunt, “we were saved by mermaids.”
Oogami chokes on the piece of fish he was eating. Sakuma raises a single eyebrow in interest, and it disappears beneath the brim of his tricorn hat and the thick, curling bangs that line his face.
Chiaki asks, “Why?”
Adonis waits a moment before responding. “Because I have seen one.”
“You saw a mermaid?” Oogami says, voice riddled with disbelief. “Like fuck ya did, Adonis. Those’re just myths.”
“No, I am certain that I have seen one,” Adonis replies, voice even and measured despite the increasingly bizarre nature of the conversation. “He told me that his name is Kanzaki.”
“I think ya gave yourself heatstroke,” Oogami says. “You’re hallucinating.” He scoffs, then digs his toe into the sand. “Mermaids. As if.”
Sakuma nods, as if in agreement with Oogami, but there’s a strange glint to his ruby-red eyes that Chiaki can’t quite read.
Chiaki would be on Oogami’s side, probably, if it weren’t for the fact that he still cannot figure out whose green eyes he saw when he was resuscitated, the first night he washed up on this deserted island. None of the pirates that were shipwrecked here with him had green eyes, leaving Chiaki more than a little confused. Who else could it be, then, if not a mermaid?
(There’s probably a few options Chiaki could try before ‘mermaid’. Still, he can’t say he isn’t at least a little bit curious as to what Adonis saw.)
“Would Kanzaki be willing to meet with the rest of us?” Chiaki finds himself asking despite the absurdity of it. Oogami’s eyes widen, and then narrow as he glares at Chiaki, surprise taken over almost instantly by an expression that lets Chiaki know how strongly Oogami thinks he’s acting like a fool right now.
Adonis seems to mull over Chiaki’s words. “I can ask him,” Adonis says, and Oogami scowls, and Sakuma’s lips curl upwards in the barest hint of a smile, and Chiaki grins.
“I’m excited to meet him!” Chiaki says. The fire crackles, smoke drifting up into the inky night sky. Chiaki tries to not get his hopes up.
-
Chiaki tried and failed in not getting his hopes up, and Kanzaki smashes through every expectation Chiaki had with a sledgehammer.
He is a mermaid. He is very much a mermaid, with a slim torso decorated with two identical scars on his chest that melts into rich, violet scales, the kind of purples that Chiaki has only ever seen royalty wear. And they’re scales, certainly — not dissimilar to the scales on the fish they ate for breakfast today (and for dinner the night before. And for breakfast that day. And for dinner the night before that. And—) and ending in a fin so delicate it looks almost translucent, flicking back and forth softly beneath the surface of the water.
“Holy shit,” Chiaki hears Oogami mutter beneath his breath as he steps into the small cove Adonis led them to.
“Adonis!” Kanzaki says, and he swims over the best he can to Adonis despite how the water becomes more shallow as it approaches the small beach within the cove. “I have brought some companions of mine; I hope you do not mind the intrusion. I thought it only fitting to bring my own acquaintances, now that you are gracing me with the presence of yours.”
“That is fine, Kanzaki,” Adonis says. He strips his shirt, toes off his shoes, rolls up the cuffs of his pants, and steps easily into the water, until he can crouch at roughly eye level to Kanzaki without much discomfort. “Thank you again for agreeing to meet with us.”
Adonis introduces the three other people in the cove. Kanzaki takes that as his cue to do the same, and he disappears briefly beneath the surface of the water before returning, followed by two new faces.
One is blond, with a golden tail that seems dull in the relative shade of the cove, but Chiaki can already imagine how beautiful it becomes in the sunlight. An easy smile rests on his lips, but there’s something guarded and distrustful in his brown eyes. Kanzaki introduces the mermaid as Hakaze Kaoru.
The third — Chiaki’s eyes settle on the third figure rising from the water, and he sucks in a gasp so harsh that it catches in his lungs and leaves him as a hoarse cough.
“You!” Chiaki yells, cutting off Kanzaki’s introduction. “You’re the one that saved me!”
The third mermaid grins, a slow, settling thing, like the wave receding from the shore, eyes curling into half-crescents. “Yes,” he says, and his voice is just as inevitable and sure as the tide, “I am.”
-
Chiaki learns about Kanata.
That his name is Kanata. That Kanzaki refers to him as ‘Shinkai-dono’, or ‘Your Highness’, both which make Kanata scrunch his nose and screw up his eyes like he’s just smelled something disgusting.
(Kanata doesn’t tell him, but Chiaki can guess, can get Hakaze and Kanzaki to fill in what few gaps they’re willing to address — he learns that Kanata is a prince, or something close to one, and that he does not like the position he holds. What his family expects of him. What people expect of him because of his family.
Chiaki calls him ‘Shinkai’ instead of ‘Kanata’, once, just to try it, and learns that Kanata will smack his tail so fiercely upon the surface of the water that Chiaki ends up soaked.)
Chiaki learns that Kanata cannot leave the water. Hakaze can, and Kanzaki can, (albeit for limited amounts of time) and Chiaki as well as the pirates he’s stranded with learns that as soon as their tails are completely dry, they turn to legs. (This involved a brief and hilarious day where they realized that the legs also came with the genitals , and that there were now two very naked men on the beach who still didn’t quite know how legs worked . Chiaki hasn’t laughed that much since before they got shipwrecked.)
He isn’t sure if it’s that Kanata can’t leave the water, or that he won’t — regardless, Chiaki is more than content to sit in the shallows with Kanata, and watch with some amusement as Adonis attempts to teach Kanzaki to walk on two legs and Oogami throws a giant banana leaf at Hakaze — “cover up, dammit, I don’t want to see your junk! I don’t care if you’re a fish most of the time!" — and Sakuma does little to help either of them.
Chiaki learns — and learns it over and over again, whenever he spots Kanata’s face breaking through the endless ocean — just how beautiful Kanata is. Ethereal. Seaglass-green eyes and blue hair that is still somehow silky despite how often it’s submerged in saltwater. Soft and easy smiles.
Kanata asks him, as Chiaki is admiring the smooth expanse of skin between his eyebrows, the slight dimple in his right cheek when he smiles, “Chiaki, how did you fall in love with the sea?” and Chiaki learns that Kanata is more perceptive than he first lets on, and more poetic than his slow way of talking would have you believe, and that maybe — just maybe — Kanata is as interested in learning about Chiaki as Chiaki is in learning about him.
-
“Chiaki,” Kanata calls, and Chiaki’s eyes snap to the horizon line. Kanata is sitting on the beach, torso sticking out of the back-and-forth waves, a good few feet away from where Chiaki has been sitting for the past who-knows-how-long, knees tucked close to his chest, arms wrapped around his legs. “You look worried.”
And maybe, if it were anyone else — Chiaki would smile and laugh and say that he’s just tired, that’s all, that it’s been a crazy few weeks. But Kanata’s eyes when they meet his are so honest, and the slowly setting sun paints him golden, and his blue-green tail flicks, back and forth in the water, and Chiaki is filled with the inexplicable urge to tell Kanata everything.
“My junior officers,” Chiaki says. He knows his voice is quieter than it usually is, and that is probably cause enough for concern, but he doesn’t doubt that Kanata can still hear him, even from this distance. “I’m worried about them. They didn’t wash up on this island, and—”
Chiaki cuts himself off. Kanata’s voice may be some kind of siren song to his secrets, but he still has some restraint.
“I can find them,” Kanata says.
“What?”
“I can find them,” he repeats, and Chiaki swears he has water in his ears, because, what?
“How are you going to find them?” Chiaki asks.
Kanata’s tail splashes down on an incoming wave, painting him in a spray of mist. “The ocean has many ears,” Kanata says, like that explains anything. “It reaches very far. I can find them, Chiaki.”
“Oh,” Chiaki says. He isn’t quite sure what to say. And then he thinks about it a bit more, and says, “You can tell me if they’ve died, too. I would rather—” and his throat gets suddenly thick, thinking about the corpses of Nagumo and Takamine and Sengoku drifting in the unforgiving ocean that Kanata calls home, “I would rather know. I need to know.”
Kanata looks at him for a long, long moment. Like he’s studying Chiaki. “I will find them,” Kanata says, finally. And then he disappears as the next wave crashes against the shore, the refracting light of the water droplets that spin off of his tail the only sign he was ever here.
Chiaki sits, and thinks for a bit too long about whether it meant anything, that Kanata shifted from saying he ‘can’ find Chiaki’s crewmates, to that he ‘will’.
-
They’ve settled into a routine, here on the island.
So much of a routine that Chiaki doesn’t even realize, until he’s scratching another tally mark into the cove wall to track how many days it’s been since their shipwreck, that it’s his birthday today.
“Chiaki,” a familiar voice calls, and Chiaki drops the rock he was using to mark the wall as he spins around, coming face to face with Kanata, head peeking out from the water at the deepest end of the cove, where a small opening in the rock leads to the endless blue sea.
“Ah, Kanata! Hello,” Chiaki says in response.
“You were looking at the wall for a long time,” Kanata says, and though his tone is light it still feels like an accusation, like a demand for an explanation.
“Oh, that— it’s, well, um,” Chiaki stammers, because he doesn’t know if it’s worth talking about, when they’re still all stuck on this island, but something in Kanata’s eyes makes him want to tell the truth, and so he does. “It’s my birthday today. I think. If we’ve done the math right about how long we’ve been stuck here.”
Kanata hums quietly. It echoes in the small space, watery and musical. “Meet me on the beach,” Kanata says, and then he disappears, the only evidence of his being here the slightly flicker of his fin above the surface as he swims away, and the spray of mist that coats the far wall of the cove in his wake.
-
On Chiaki’s birthday, stranded on an island and both more and less alone than he imagined he would find himself, a mermaid leads him into the deep sea.
Leads Chiaki farther and farther, until the sand falls away from his feet and he has to rely on his training as a member of the navy, until it’s farther than Chiaki has ever gone without a boat and he is relying more and more on Kanata to move with every moment, if only for the fear that starts to paralyze his limbs.
On Chiaki’s birthday, he is kissed — above the surface of the water, where he can close his eyes and tangle his hands in Kanata’s sea-kissed hair and taste the salt on Kanata’s lips, on his own, and feel as surrounded and safe by the ocean as he does from Kanata’s arms. And then Kanata smiles, eyes curving into half-crescents, mischief twinkling in his glass-green eyes, and then Chiaki is learning what it is like to kiss while underwater, eyes closed because of the stinging saltwater. Kanata is warm against him despite the chill of the sea, and Chiaki doesn’t think he’s ever felt safer.
And then Kanata pulls away, holding him close by the arms, and he speaks, so unfailingly clear despite the water in Chiaki’s ears. “You can breathe underwater, Chiaki,” he says, and it isn’t that Chiaki doesn’t trust him but rather that he doesn’t want to drown (on his birthday ) and so he doesn’t. He doesn’t, until Kanata looks at him with that same mischief-riddled grin and says, “Don’t you know that mermaid kisses are magic?”
And Chiaki takes in a stuttering, hesitant breath, and his lungs fill with nothing but air, and he takes another, larger breath and smiles. “ You’re magic,” he tells Kanata, and it’s cheesy but it’s genuine, as real as the air in his lungs and the salt water surrounding them and the curl of Kanata’s tail around Chiaki’s legs.
And then Kanata pulls him closer, with strong, warm arms, and Chiaki learns what it is like to be underwater and to be breathless — not from the water around you, but from the creatures that live in it, and the insistent, comforting press of Kanata’s lips against his own.